10 Most Horrible Death Penalties

Capital punishment or the death penalty is a legal process whereby a person is put to death by the state as a punishment for a crime. The judicial decree that someone be punished in this manner is a death sentence, while the actual process of killing the person is an execution. Read more>>

10. Buried Alive

This death penalty has been used for both individuals and groups. Victims are usually tied and then placed in a hole and buried. There was the Nanjing Massacre during World War II, when Japanese soldiers buried Chinese civilians living in what is called "Ten Thousand Corpse Ditch".

9. Slow Slicing

Slow slicing (Lingchi) (simplified Chinese: 凌迟; traditional Chinese: 凌遲; pinyin: língchí, alternately transliterated Ling Chi or Leng T'che), also translated as the slow process, the lingering death, or death by a thousand cuts (simplified Chinese: 杀千刀; traditional Chinese: 殺千刀) or “千刀万剐”, was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly AD 900 until its abolition in 1905. In this form of execution, the condemned person was killed by using a knife to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time.

8. Burning at the Stake

Death by burning has been used as a form of capital punishment for centuries, often associated with crimes such as treason and witchcraft. Now, this is regarded as cruel and unusual, but before the 18th century, who was burned at the stake was a common practice. The victim tied to a large stake in the city or anywhere else with the audience and then lit the fire. It is considered as one of the slowest way to die.

7. The Five Pains

The Five Pains is a Chinese form of capital punishment invented during the Qin Dynasty (221 - 208 BC). The Five Pains were as follows: first the victim's nose was cut off, followed by a hand and then a foot. The victim was then castrated and finally cut in half at the waist. Li Si, who was chief advisor to emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, invented this form of lethal torture, and was ultimately executed this way himself.

6. Hanged, Drawn, and Quartered

To be hanged, drawn and quartered (less commonly "hung, drawn and quartered") was from 1351 a penalty in England for men convicted of high treason, although the ritual was first recorded during the reigns of King Henry III (1216–1272) and his successor, Edward I (1272–1307). Convicts were fastened to a hurdle, or wooden panel, and drawn by horse to the place of execution, where they were hanged (almost to the point of death), emasculated, disembowelled, beheaded and quartered (chopped into four pieces). Their remains were often displayed in prominent places across the country, such as London Bridge. For reasons of public decency, women convicted of high treason were instead burnt at the stake.

5. Guillotine

The guillotine (/ˈɡɪlətiːn/ or /ˈɡiː.ətiːn/; French: [ɡijɔtin]) is a device designed for carrying out executions by decapitation. It consists of a tall upright frame in which a weighted and angled blade is raised to the top and suspended. The condemned person is secured at the bottom of the frame, with his or her neck held directly below the blade. The blade is then released, to fall swiftly and sever the head from the body. The device is best known for its use in France, in particular during the French Revolution, when it "became a part of popular culture, celebrated as the people's avenger by supporters of the Revolution and vilified as the pre-eminent symbol of the Reign of Terror by opponents." However, it continued to be used long after the Revolution and remained France's standard method of judicial execution until the abolition of capital punishment by President François Mitterrand in 1981. The last person guillotined in France was Hamida Djandoubi, on 10 September 1977.

4. Cement shoes

Cement shoes is a slang term adopted by the American Mafia crime world for a method of execution that involves weighting down a victim and throwing him or her into the water to drown. It has become adopted in the US as a humorous term representing any exotic threat from criminals. This gives rise to the term of someone who "sleeps with the fishes", a euphemism for the deceased. It was frequently used by the Gambino crime family in the prohibition era.

Cement shoes traditionally involve binding or incapacitating the victim and placing each foot into the two spaces of a cinderblock, which is then filled with wet cement. Sometimes a plain bucket or box is used. When the cement hardens, the victim is thrown into a river, lake or the ocean. It is unclear how often such a cumbersome and time-consuming method of execution was actually used, outside of Hollywood movies. It could also be used for aiding in the disposal of a corpse already dispatched by other means so that the victim is never found if deposited in deep water.

3. Republican marriage

Republican marriage (French: mariage républicain) was a form of execution that allegedly occurred in Nantes during the Reign of Terror in Revolutionary France and "involved tying a naked man and woman together and drowning them". This was reported to have been practiced during the drownings at Nantes (noyades) that were ordered by local Jacobin representative-on-mission Jean-Baptiste Carrier between November 1793 and January 1794 in the city of Nantes. Most accounts indicate that the victims were drowned in the Loire River, although a few sources describe an alternative means of execution in which the bound couple is run through with a sword, either before, or instead of drowning.
While the executions of men, women and children by drowning in Nantes is not generally disputed, the factual nature of the "republican marriages," in particular, has been doubted by several historians who suspect it to be a legend. The earliest reports of such "marriages" date from 1794, when Carrier was tried for his crimes, and they were soon cited by contemporary counter-revolutionary authors such as Louis-Marie Prudhomme and Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald.

2. The Brazen Bull

The brazen bull, bronze bull, or Sicilian bull, was a torture and execution device designed in ancient Greece. Its inventor, metal worker Perillos of Athens, proposed it to Phalaris, the tyrant of Akragas, Sicily, as a new means of executing criminals. The bull was made entirely of bronze, hollow, with a door in one side.  The condemned were locked in the bull, and a fire was set under it, heating the metal until the person inside roasted to death.

1. Crucifixion

Crucifixion is an ancient method of deliberately slow and painful execution in which the condemned person is tied or nailed to a large wooden cross and left to hang until dead.

Crucifixion was used among the Seleucids, Carthaginians, and Romans from about the 6th century BC to the 4th century AD. In the year 337, Emperor Constantine I abolished it in the Roman Empire out of veneration for Jesus Christ, the most famous victim of crucifixion. It was also used as a form of execution in Japan for criminals, inflicted also on some Christians.

A crucifix (an image of Christ crucified on a cross) is the main religious symbol for Catholics, Lutherans, and Eastern Orthodox, but most Oriental Orthodox and Protestant Christians prefer to use a cross without the figure (the "corpus": Latin for "body") of Christ. Most crucifixes portray Jesus on a Latin cross, rather than any other shape, such as a Tau cross or a Greek cross.